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"It was powered by (I think) the battery from an electric wheelchair, and drive was from the windscreen wiper motors from a Ford Orion that we got from a scrap yard. Unfortunately we didn’t have access to any sensible gearing, so we put rather large wheels on the motors to try to make it a little less slow (though it was still too slow!). Control was fairly basic as the two wheels were just driven independently to steer. The chassis was welded box-section mild steel, and the outer shell was sheet steel. Our weapon was a circular cutting blade on a spring-loaded arm. As far as I remember it weighed about 20 kg."

Damacles was a grey, somewhat wedge-shaped robot, armed with a cutting disc on a spring-loaded arm. The robot weighed roughly 20kg, and used sheet steel armour which appeared to be reasonably durable. The robot itself was fairly reliable, surviving for the whole battle, but was fairly slow, running two large independently driven wheels on windscreen wiper motors. The robot's power source was a battery from an electric wheelchair.

"Damacles was driven by Dominic Horner and the other team members at the event were Paul Montero and me, and Chris Martin also worked on the robot. The robot was built at Hampton School, where we were pupils studying A-level technology."

— Peter Mosley

Damacles was entered by a team of students from Hampton School, where all four pupils were A-level Technology students. Dominic Horner was the driver of Damacles in battle, with Paul Montero and Peter Mosley also joining him at the televised filming. Another pupil, Chris Martin, worked on Damacles but did not attend filming.

"There weren’t very many entries in the lightweight category, I think only 5 or 6, so our competition was just a single fight which lasted for a few minutes"

— Peter Mosley

Damacles in the battle

All of the robots were slow to start and weren't able to work up any sort of attack. Damacles in particular was not fast enough to reach its opposition, and broke its cutting disc on contact with another robot. Eventually, the House Robots intervened and began attacking the competitors. Damacles was able to resist sustaining much damage, and was still mobile, along with the others, when cease was called at the end of the battle.

"Damacles was durable and kept going for the whole fight, but due to our slow speed we struggled to catch the other competitors! I think also the cutting disc broke on contact with another robot at some point."

— Peter Mosley

At this point, the judges asked each roboteer to demonstrate their robot's remaining manoeuvrability. Damacles was still somewhat mobile, albeit with its usual slow speed, and the Judges voted in favour of the most mobile machine, Slippery Strana.